Parshat Chayei Sarah7 min read

Laban Poisoned the Dinner and Rebekah Rode Away by Morning

The servant would not touch the meal until he had said his errand. He talked half the night. By morning Rebekah's father was dead in the house.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Servant Counted the Trips to the Well
  2. Laban Ran Out to the Well and Looked at the Ring
  3. The Man Would Not Eat Until He Had Spoken
  4. They Asked the Girl and She Said She Would Go
  5. The Lamp Came Back On in Sarah's Tent
  6. Her Grandsons Wept in Egypt for Houses Not Yet Built
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The Servant Counted the Trips to the Well

He brought the ten camels down on their knees outside the city at evening, the hour the women come out to draw, and he prayed with his eyes open. Let the girl who offers water to me and then offers it to the animals be the one.

He had not finished saying it when Rebekah came out with the pitcher on her shoulder.

"Give me a little water," he said.

"Drink, my lord." She dropped the pitcher down onto her hand for him. Then she said the other half of it, the half he had not asked for. "I will draw for your camels too, until they have finished."

She emptied the pitcher into the trough and ran back to the well and filled it and ran back, and did it again, and kept doing it. Ten camels drink an enormous amount of water. The servant of Abraham stood there and said nothing at all, watching to find out whether God had answered him or not.

When the last animal lifted its head he went into his pack and took out gold. A ring for her face, weighing one beka, which is a half shekel, which is exactly what every one of her children would one day hand over for the work of the sanctuary. Two bracelets for her wrists, ten pieces of gold between them, one for each of the words that would be cut into two stone tablets at a mountain none of them had heard of yet.

She thought she had been given jewelry.

Laban Ran Out to the Well and Looked at the Ring

Her brother heard about it and ran.

Whatever else Laban was, he was quick. He came out of the city to the spring and he looked the stranger over the way a man looks over livestock, and then he looked at the gold on his sister's hands and did the sum. Eliezer had come here once with ten camels and he was only a servant. This one arrives with treasure and hands it out at a well.

"Come in, blessed of the Lord," Laban said. "Why are you standing outside? I have cleaned the house of strange worship and I have made a place ready for the camels."

He took the gear off the animals himself. He brought straw and feed. He brought water for the men to wash their feet. Then he set food out on the table in front of the guest, and there was poison in it, enough to kill.

The Man Would Not Eat Until He Had Spoken

The servant looked at the dish and pushed it away.

"I will not eat until I have said what I came to say."

"Speak, then."

So he spoke, and he took his time. The oath his master made him swear with his hand on the sign of the covenant. The son born to a woman past the age for it. The refusal to take a wife for that son from the daughters of Canaan. The prayer at the well and how fast it had been answered.

They talked into the evening and the food sat there getting cold, and at some point in the night Rebekah's father ate it.

In the morning they found Bethuel dead.

The house that had a wedding to arrange now had a burial, and the brother and the mother came to the guest with a reasonable request. Let the girl stay with us a year. Ten months at least. There has been a death.

"Do not hold me back," the servant said. "The Lord has prospered my road. Send me to my master."

They Asked the Girl and She Said She Would Go

"We will call Rebekah," they said, "and hear what she says."

They brought her in. Her father was lying dead in the same house. Her brother had put the food on the table. Nobody in the room told her any of that.

"Will you go with this man?"

"I will go."

They blessed her on the way out, and the blessing had teeth in it. Until now you were our sister. Now you are going to be married to a righteous man. May thousands of ten thousands come out of you, and may your sons take the cities of the people who hate them.

She got up on a camel with her nurse and rode. The road that had taken so long coming folded itself under them, and they went in a single day.

The Lamp Came Back On in Sarah's Tent

Isaac was walking back from the study house of Shem, past the well in the wilderness where the Living and Eternal One had shown himself to him, the One who sees and is not seen. It was evening. He went out into the open field to pray, and when he looked up there were camels coming.

Rebekah saw the man in the field and came down off the camel and asked who he was, and when the servant told her she took her veil and covered her face.

Isaac brought her into his mother's tent. The lamp there had gone out the day Sarah died and had stayed out. It came back on with Rebekah standing under it.

He loved her because her hands did what his mother's hands had done. That was the end of his mourning.

Her Grandsons Wept in Egypt for Houses Not Yet Built

The gold on her wrists went down into Egypt eventually, in the blood of her grandsons.

Joseph fell on Benjamin's neck in a room in Egypt and cried, and he was not crying about the twenty years. He was crying because the Temple would stand in Benjamin's portion of the land and would be pulled down twice. Benjamin cried on Joseph's neck for the tent at Shiloh, which would stand in Joseph's portion and would also fall.

Joseph dried none of it. He kissed the rest of his brothers one by one and wept over each of them, because he could see their children's children going into slavery in the country he had just brought them to.

Only after the tears stopped could any of them speak to him.

TargumPatriarchsTempleProphecyRebekahJoseph
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From the tradition

Sources

5 sources

The texts behind this telling. Some cards carry a translation of the source; others are our own retelling of it, and each card says which. Every card links out to the original.

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 24:22Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, trans. J. W. Etheridge, London, 1862 · Public Domain

Once the camels had finished drinking, all ten of them, every last swallow, the servant reached into his pack and took out jewelry. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 24:22) refuses to let these ornaments be ordinary.

The earring weighed a drachma of gold. The Targum tells us this was the counterpart of the half-shekel that her children would one day give for the work of the sanctuary. The two bracelets weighed ten shekels together, matching the two tablets of stone on which the Aseret ha-Dibrot, the Ten Words, would be inscribed.

Read it again. The jewelry the servant placed on Rivekah's wrists at a well in Aram was a physical prophecy. Her descendants, still centuries away from Sinai, were already stamped into the gold she now wore. The weights matched the future.

This is what the Targum does at its most daring: it treats time like a braided rope. The past and the future touch at every turn. The ring on Rivekah's brow foreshadows the half-shekel of (Exodus 30:13). The bracelets foreshadow the tablets of Exodus 32. The patriarch's servant is not decorating a bride; he is handing her the keys to Sinai.

The lesson is quiet but fierce. Every object in a holy life can be a hinge. A piece of jewelry. A conversation. A pitcher. The ordinary is where the extraordinary is already hiding, waiting for a faithful person to notice the weight of what they are holding.

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Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 45:14Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, trans. J. W. Etheridge, London, 1862 · Public Domain

When Joseph and Benjamin finally embrace, their tears do not flow for the reasons we expect. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan reads the verse as prophecy.

"He bowed himself upon his brother Benjamin's neck, and wept; because it would be that the house of holiness should be builded in the portion of Benjamin, and be twice destroyed: and Benjamin wept upon Joseph's neck, because he saw that the tabernacle of Shiloh would be in the portion of Joseph and be destroyed" (Genesis 45:14).

Joseph is not weeping only for the brother in his arms. He is weeping for the Beit ha-Mikdash, the Holy Temple, which will one day stand on Mount Moriah, territory assigned to the tribe of Benjamin. That Temple will be destroyed twice: by Babylon in 586 BCE and by Rome in 70 CE. Joseph, in the Targum's mystical reading, is granted a flash of prophetic vision. He sees the two destructions in his brother's neck and weeps.

Benjamin weeps back. He sees, in his tears on Joseph's neck, the mishkan Shiloh, the Tabernacle of Shiloh, which will stand for 369 years in the territory of Joseph's son Ephraim. That sanctuary will also fall, destroyed by the Philistines around 1050 BCE when the Ark is captured (1 Samuel 4).

The Targum turns a private reunion into a cosmic accounting. Every Jewish sanctuary that will ever stand is in these two brothers' tribal inheritance. Every Jewish sanctuary that will ever fall is in these two brothers' tears. The sages teach that the weeping of tzaddikim, the righteous, is never only about their moment. It reaches forward and backward across generations.

Two brothers cry on each other's shoulders. Two holy houses cry with them. The Jewish tradition of lament begins here, in the arms of the first brothers who learn how to weep for a future they cannot prevent.

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Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 45:15Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, trans. J. W. Etheridge, London, 1862 · Public Domain

The kisses Joseph gives his brothers are not only affection. In Targum Pseudo-Jonathan's reading, they are grief in advance.

"And he kissed all his brethren, and wept over them, because he saw that the sons of his people would be brought into bondage. And afterward his brethren discoursed with him" (Genesis 45:15). The Aramaic preserves the strange timing of Joseph's sorrow. He is reunited. He is holding his brothers. And he is already weeping for the enslavement that will befall their descendants centuries later in this same land.

Joseph sees it. The Targum insists he is a prophet in this moment. The shibbud Mitzrayim, the Egyptian bondage foretold to Abraham at the Covenant Between the Pieces (Genesis 15:13), four hundred years of slavery for his descendants, will unfold in the very Mizraim where Joseph now governs. His hospitality is the first step of a road that leads to Pharaoh's whips.

The sages find this devastating. Joseph is saving his family from famine, yes. But he also knows, the Targum says he sees, that the rescue is the beginning of a long captivity. The grain today will become the bricks tomorrow. The welcome at Pharaoh's court will become the hard labor under Pharaoh's overseers.

And yet he kisses them anyway. He weeps, and he kisses, and he brings them down. Because the Holy One's plan requires the family to enter Egypt. The four hundred years must pass. The Exodus cannot happen without a slavery to exit. Joseph cannot stop the future, but he can at least meet it with open arms and full granaries.

"And afterward his brethren discoursed with him." Only after the tears could they speak.

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Targum Jonathan on Genesis 24Targum Jonathan

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, trans. J. W. Etheridge, London, 1862 · Public Domain

Abraham made his servant Eliezer swear an oath by placing his hand on the mark of circumcision. The Torah says "under my thigh." The Targum says exactly what it means: the section of circumcision, the sign of the covenant. No euphemism needed.

Eliezer traveled to Aram with ten camels and all of Abraham's treasures. At the well, he prayed for a sign: whichever woman offered water to both him and his camels would be the one God had chosen. Rebecca appeared immediately, the Targum says "in that little hour, while he had not ceased to speak." The answer came before the prayer was finished.

Here the Targum inserts its most remarkable detail. Eliezer gave Rebecca a gold nose ring weighing one drachma, which the Targum says corresponded to the half-shekel head tax her descendants would one day give for the Temple. The two bracelets weighed ten sileen of gold, "the counterpart of the two tablets on which were inscribed the Ten Words." The jewelry was prophecy in metal. Every gift Eliezer placed on Rebecca's body encoded the future of her unborn nation.

At Laban's house, the Targum adds a chilling scene absent from the Torah. Laban set poisoned food before Eliezer to kill him. Eliezer refused to eat until he had told his story, and by morning, it was Bethuel. Rebecca's own father, who had eaten the prepared food and died. That is why the Torah says only "the brother and mother" negotiated Rebecca's departure. Her father was already dead.

When Rebecca arrived in Canaan, the Targum says Isaac was returning from the school of Shem the Great. He brought her into Sarah's tent, and the light that had gone out when Sarah died was rekindled. Isaac loved Rebecca because "he saw her works were upright as the works of his mother." The miraculous light confirmed it.

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Yalkut Shimoni on Torah 109:2Yalkut Shimoni on Torah

Translation of the source text.Torat Emet (Yalkut Shimoni) · CC-BY-NC

"And the man took a gold nose-ring" (Genesis 24:22) - there was a precious stone in it, and its weight was a beka; "and two bracelets upon her hands" - corresponding to the two tablets; "ten gold in weight" - corresponding to the Ten Commandments. "Is there room in your father's house for us to lodge?" (Genesis 24:23-25) - one lodging. "There is also room to lodge" - many lodgings.

"And the man bowed his head and prostrated himself to the LORD" (Genesis 24:26) - from here that one gives thanks for good tidings. "And he said: Blessed be the LORD, God of my master Abraham" (Genesis 24:27) - since the land and the road had leaped before me, I knew that "on the way the LORD has led me" to the house of my master's kinsmen.

"And the maiden ran and told her mother's house" (Genesis 24:28) - a woman is accustomed to tell only her mother's house. They objected to him: but is it not written, "And she ran and told her father" (Genesis 29:12)? He said to them: her mother had died, and to whom should she tell, if not her father? "And Rebecca had a brother, and his name was Laban" (Genesis 24:29-31). Rabbi Berekhiah said: [his name is] to his discredit - he was whitened in wickedness. "And Laban ran out to the man, to the spring" - he eyed him. "And it came to pass, when he saw the nose-ring" - he eyed it for himself.

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